A quick heads-up: There will be no ‘First Draft’ Wednesday due to Veterans Day. It will be back in your inboxes on Thursday.
The late economist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating what every sports champion knows: losing hurts twice as badly as winning feels good.
The Democratic triumph last week was gigantic enough to challenge that formula. They smothered Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, won fat House and Senate majorities, and scored breakthrough victories that re-shuffle the presidential map. The glow from resuscitating the American experiment will last awhile.
But the calendar is already presenting their next set of challenges. The incoming Congress, juggling calls for addressing Americans’ affordability problems and pursuing accountability for Trump’s depredations, has to set priorities for the next two years.
Left and center-left factions have begun wrestling over their competing visions of the Democratic Party’s 21st century identity. The near-term balance between ambition and pragmatism will turn on the just-getting-started race for the 2028 presidential nomination.
Trump has sent wildly divergent signals about his plans for the remaining time America is stuck with him.